MH370 search goes on: Focus on new objects spotted by Australian aircraft

A Royal Australian Air Force AP-3C Orion sits on the tarmac in preparation for a flight to search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 in the southern Indian Ocean, at Pearce Air Force base in Bullsbrook, 35 kms north of Perth, on March 22, 2014 (AFP Photo / Rob Griffith) / AFP

An Australian aircraft spotted new objects, including a wooden pallet, during the search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 on Saturday, according to Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott.

“Yesterday one of our civilian search aircraft got visuals on
a number of objects in a fairly small area in the overall
Australian search zone,” Abbott said on Sunday
morning.“A number of small objects, fairly close together
within the Australian search zone, including a wooden
pallet.”

Abbott added that some of the objects would need to be recovered
before anything specific could be determined.

“It’s still too early to be definite [that objects came from
an aircraft] but definitely we have now had a number of very
credible leads and there is increasing hope — no more than hope —
that we might be on the road to discovering what did happen to
this ill-fated aircraft,” he said.

Two Chinese search planes and two Japanese Orion aircraft have
been deployed to join the search efforts.

The new developments come after Chinese satellites discovered a
new object in the waters of the southern Indian Ocean that may be
wreckage from flight MH370. The Malaysia Airlines jetliner went
missing with 239 people aboard on March 8.

China's finding was first announced by Malaysia’s defense
minister and acting transport minister Hishammuddin Hussein, who
was handed a note with details during a press conference in the
country’s capital of Kuala Lumpur.

The discovered object is around 22 meters long and 13 meters
wide, the Chinese State Administration of Science, Technology and
Industry for National Defense (SASTIND) said on its website.

It was spotted on March 18 in a remote area off the western
Australian coast by China’s high-definition earth observation
satellite, Gaofen-1, SASTIND said.

Flight MH370 left Kuala Lumpur on March 8 destined for Beijing,
but mysteriously disappeared from radar screens around an hour
after takeoff.

For the last two weeks, over 20 countries have attempted to
establish what happened to the Boeing 777, but their efforts have
so far proved fruitless.

In recent days, the international search switched to the southern
Indian Ocean, far off Australia’s western coast, after floating
objects were photographed by satellites. Australian PM Tony
Abbott described the search area as “the most inaccessible
spot that you can imagine on the face of the Earth.”